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A Frailty Model For Projection Of Human Mortality Improvements, Shaun S. Wang, Robert L. Brown

Journal of Actuarial Practice (1993-2006)

Based on the everyday observations that individual human beings vary significantly in their capacity to combat death, we adopt a so-called frailty model of human mortality. This frailty model assumes that each individual in a given population is endowed with his or her own frailty index, r, which remains constant for life. In addition, we assume that the individual's force of mortality (hazard rate function) at age x, Ux(r), satisfies Ux(r) = rUx where Ux is the population's base force of mortality at age x. Given the probability distribution of the frailty index among the newborns in the population, an …